Duke Divinity School

Divinity Online Edition - Spring 2006


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Blessings

Women divinity students, whose numbers increased fivefold between 1971 and 1973, study in the student lounge (later converted to Centenary Lecture Hall) in New Divinity. Right, a classroom scene from the same era.

Courtesy of Duke Divinity School Archives

Women divinity students, whose numbers increased fivefold between 1971 and 1973, study in the student lounge (later converted to Centenary Lecture Hall) in New Divinity. Right, a classroom scene from the same era.

In the academic year 1973-74, Duke hosted the Second Annual Women’s Interseminary Conference. Sally Bently Doeley, who edited one of the first collections about the church and feminism— Women’s Liberation and the Church—was one of the speakers.

In that same year, several women began to ask for a center for divinity school women. A small grant helped start the center, and Jill Raitt, the only woman faculty member, gave up her office space and moved to the top floor of Old Divinity. The Women’s Center remained in 018 Gray until 2006, when it moved down the hall to a new space at 021 Gray.

Excerpted from Blessings: A Resource Manual & Handbook for the Women of Duke Divinity School, which was written and published by student S. Amelia Stinson-Wesley in the spring of 1993

Today, the divinity school’s Women’s Center is asking for your help in reconstructing its history. Jessica E. Terrell and Theresa S. Thames, former Women’s Center coordinators, updated Stinson-Wesley’s 1993 edition of Blessings, a divinity school student resource manual on gender and theology, for their research project requirement in the Certificate Program in Gender, Theology, and Ministry. The title is Continuous Blessings: A Resource Manual on Gender and Theology, Duke Divinity School and you will find a digital copy of this resource on the Women’s Center Web site.

We hope to update their work continually through the digital edition. Were you a Women’s Center coordinator, or do you remember experiences you'd like to share during those years between the publication of Blessings and the new resource manual?

If so, please send an e-mail toDr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson. Thank you for your help!